When professor and author on negotiation Stuart Diamond gets invited by CEOs to teach them about various topics, they also interrupt him to tell him that the thing he is teaching they already learned in business school. He responds: “It doesn’t matter if you know it. You have to do it.”
My observations are the same. When I talk to people about how to address various challenges they face in life and at work, I tell them things they already know. The response is too often, “I start but don’t stick to it. There’s always something that happens soon after the start that breaks the chain …” And that’s the main problem. The secret is not in a technique but in doing it consistently.